Vid.ly lets one video work on any device with a short link

January 24, 2011 6:00 AMDevindra Hardawar

Tired of the endless incompatibilities between video files and multimedia devices? Consider Vid.ly, a new service launching today in private beta testing that aims to make distributing your video to a wide variety of devices dead simple.

With Vid.ly, you only need to upload your video once (you can also provide a link to FTP, HTTP, Amazon S3 cloud storage, and Cloud Files). The service then transcodes it to 14 popular web and mobile formats, making it compatible with most modern smartphones, tablets and more. It’s also easy to share your video with anyone: The service provides a short URL (beginning with vid.ly) once your video is done encoding, and when someone clicks on the link, it automatically provides the video file compatible with their device.

In addition to the typical social networking integration, Vid.ly also lets you embed code on your website to automatically display the best quality video file for visitors’ devices.

The service is an answer to the nightmare of video production for many online publishers. Now instead of manually reencoding a video file on your own and hoping that your conversion settings are compatible with new devices, you only need to throw the file online and let Vid.ly do all the work.

Vid.ly is currently accepting the first 1,000 qualified users into its private beta (sign up using the code HNY2011). Users can upload unlimited videos up to 1 gigabyte in size for free, and there’s also a pro version in the works that will add features like API access, the ability to choose a specific CDN storage location for your videos, access to live streaming over the web, and the ability to tweak Vid.ly’s encoding profiles.

The service comes from the team behind online video encoding company Encoding.com. The company tells me it’s looking at Vid.ly as a way to help promote the Encoding.com brand, and there’s also the possibility for combined pricing down the line with Vid.ly’s pro services and its parent site.